Professor for philosophy at Texas Tech University specializing Political Legal and moral philosophy. Brandon is assistant professor at Bowling GreenState University specializing in ethics and moral psychology and social philosophy. We will take audience questions online using cato events. Watching the event posted so they can find it. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having a. Great to be here. To be here briefly, what is grandstanding . The simplest Bumper Sticker description of grandstandin grandstanding, using the discussion of morality and Public Discourse as a vanity project with morality and justice and family values and tradition to draw attention to themselves to look like a moral paragon to think of morley in my end to care about the American Factory worker to be something more detailed thats very simple that it has two parts the grand standards want a certain audience a referenced network to have them come to believe with moral properties recall this recognition desire and want to be recognized with certain moral qualities by certain people in the audience the second is that they Say Something because they want to impress people and the thing that they say what they type into facebook or twitter or on the stump speech what they say is the grandstanding expression. That is motivated in a significant way by the desire for praise, to be seen on the side of the angels so its a very simple thing in terms of the equation grandstanding justice saying something in Public Discourse with the significant motivation to be seen as morally impressive. What is the difference between grandstanding and virtue signaling . Good question. They are related terms. I do think often when people talk about virtue signaling they could just as well be talking about grandstanding. But nonetheless we think that virtue signaling is not and i on ideal term to capture what is going wrong when people use moral talk the way we describe. As a catege right kinds of expressions. So you send a signal anytime you talk about morality at all. You make any moral claim at all youve are signaling to people that you probably believe that thing coming may be committed to it but you dont object to any instance of the communication people are using moral talks for the wrong reason and they are doing so intentionally. So, we think that this grandstanding is sort of a narrow term and south picks out these things to complain about. I want to add to the comments when we started writing about grand and standing the term wasnt really on the scene. It was about a year after the term virtues signaling, sort of picking up online and in sort of public discussions as a term to pick up this ostentatious behavior. And to mention theres lots of reasons why we think its not the most helpful terminology to pick out a discussion of selfinvolved moral talk. For all the reasons he mentioned and also the term has been picked up in the cultural war. Virtues signaling as a term tends to come though a complaint from the left. Buall the research that weve de over seven studies and 6,000 participants, all the evidence we have is that grandstanding is equally bipartisan. People on the left do it just as much as people on the right and we found people on the ideological extreme to do with much more. So because the term has gotten caught up in the cultural war. The perfectly innocent use of the term virtues signaling is that whenever you do some virtuous and public, whether you are trying to impress people or not, that sends a signal so theres a kind of a publication for the confusion that can result and this is one way you see this as now we have this discussion you may have seen of the signaling so theres arguments about whether someones virtues signaling so we think grandstanding is a much clearer term that dates back to the 19th century. It came out of the 1988 book, excuse me, a team 88 book on baseball and the idea was that these guys were in the outfield making claims play into the grandstands, so we think it captures the very intentional use of moral talk for selfpromotion in a way that the signaling kind of scares. The idea of virtues signaling is broader and can capture nonverbal behaviors choices, decisions that may not be made for political grandstand purposes. Perhaps someone just really does like the previous. In picking up the grandstanding you chose to focus specifically on moral talk conversations. Why that focus on speech . We think that the Public Discourse is an extremely valuable tool. Its our primary method to communicate that someone has been wrong and to identify justices to warn about threats and praise people worthy of trust. It is a very fragile tool and easy to abuse and take for granted so we think that this valuable tool you can also use this resource. Its like a resource in the comments were a public park. It can be used and abused for proper ends and other kinds of nefarious purposes. Grandstanding is one of those uses of moral talk is actually degrades the social currency and our ability to have conversations with each other they find a way to turn these discussions of important problems into discussions about themselves. So we think our focus on public conversation and given the rise of social media and how many conversations are occurring now, we think that its the time to have a conversation about how we converged. A couple of quick things, one reason to focus on the speech rather than also to bring a liveaction into the conversation i think it is reasonable to say the states change a lot when you Start Talking about actions. We might not care as much if the person wants to name after themselves because of the amount of data that they do is so much greater. If you read the book you probably noticed the gun again and again the comparisons to fly. If you want to focus on dishonesty, you could talk about all sorts of dishonest actions, dishonesty and lots of forms of expression into different areas of life. But you learn a lot by talking about the case of dishonest speech and intentionally misleading speech. So, we took that as a model for the preceding and we hope what we ended up doing sheds light on the talk for selfpromotion. The core of the book is this chapter where he set out the taxonomy of grandstanding which i think was for me, a deeply interesting section because a lot of us had this sense of what they called virtues signaling or whatever else. But separating it out is really good airplane so i was hoping maybe you could run through without taxonomthetaxonomy of is different kinds of grandstanding and the way people go about doing it. Sure. This is one of our favorite parts of the book. We run through what he called a field guide of grandstanding. One thing to note at the outset there is no foolproof test for identifying when someone is grandstanding. We talk about a lot of people the last few years and one of the questions we often get is tell me what grandstanding looks like. Later in the book they argue that isnt the way to go about solving the problem. But it can be helpful to have a roadmap for field guide about what kinds of discourse tends to exemplify grandstanding so i will run through each of the five. Piling on involves saying something other people have sa said. To show you what other people to think that you share their values. Not because they did something wrong but because they want to be seen as having certain kinds of values and they want to be seen as tough on the out groups and so on and the sort of pile on joining with others just to be seen as taking circumstance. Its what they call ramping up and its when it takes the forms of an arms race. So, we know from social psychology. Its how we match up to others. What happens in the Public Discourse is if i think of myself as caring deeply for the poor or the American Factory worker and someone in Public Discourse says something that implies that they care deeply, i have a choice to make. I cant allow them to be seen as important and impressive caring deeply for these things they need serious reform to abolish the police and about two days we went from masks dont help and if you wear a mask you are part of the cheapskate so there is part of the competition that can occur in Public Discourse where people are trying to outdo each other for the extreme demanding position to show how much they care or how sensitive they are about the certain considerations. A third form is no relation to the current president by the way. It has to do with charges. You take a morally innocent piece of behavior or maybe slight moral wrong and trumped up charges and make it something really big or important or egregious. Egregious. What that signals to others if you have a sensitive moral compass and or intolerant of any behavior and so a lot of grandstanding involves taking very innocent behavior and running it through this machine that make it a huge problem so others can see how impressive you are. It also takes the form of excessive emotions often in terms of outrage, so we know that from psychology to expressions of outrage signify your moral convictions if you get outraged about something that implies you care deeply about it. So they can exploit this background assumption and get outraged about all kinds of things. We know from psychology people get outraged to alleviate guilt and avoid suspicion about their own bad behavior and to show how morally impressive they are in the Public Discourse. Then finally, the final form grandstanding an can take is wht we call dismissiveness. Someone might Say Something like if you cant see hamilton the musical is the most morally egregious thing thats ever been produced on broadway, then i dont have time for you lets not talk anymore. Grandstanding involves a very dismissive attitude towards people, and the implication is i dont need to explain why this is wrong. Even if i did, you wouldnt understand it so these are the forms that it can take. We do think that they shed a light on the way that the grandstanding tends to rear its ugly head. In reemphasizing something brandon said at the outset this isnt a guide to spotting instances of grandstanding in the world so you can grandstand as brandon said without giving any of those five things and you can do any of those without grandstand. The point of getting this guide its just to help people understand what this account can explain and to help them see that if it is common, they should expect to see a lot of this behavior. As you were going through these your definition is almost like a mens rea requirement. It seems that a member of the kind of grandstanding we might see not so much are not necessarily as trying to get other people to think a certain way as you, but just in terms of it feels good to do these things, sometimes it just feels good to get outraged or it feels good to play along because it makes you feel better about yourself. Is that a distinct sort of behavior or is it grandstanding but just like your audience is your self . That is a nice question. I dont think there is a onesizefitsall answer to the question. You are right a lot of people behave in these engage in these behaviors into the domineering Public Discourse because it feels good. They are exercising their will to power. They just enjoy dominating other people. It gives them satisfaction. I dont think you have to be grandstanding to do that. Our view is not that its the only place in Public Discourse. Im sure theres a lot of behavior. There is a nice paper called moral outrage porn and the idea that people use moral outrage to satisfy their desires and make themselves feel good. All that being said, i do think that one reason why these things feel good to us is because they reaffirm to ourselves how good we think they are. Decades of Research Shows people think they are better than the average person. We all gave ourselves pretty high grades, morally speaking, and we typically want other people to believe those things about us, too. It feels good to have these visions reaffirmed in public. You are right that its not just the onl only audience isnt juse other person reading my post online or, you know, if im a cable talk show host, what people say about me on twitter afterwards. That is in the only audience. They are also our own audience sometimes and we are sort of playing to ourselves, to convince and reassure ourselves we are as good as they think they are. We recognize that its really complicated and people almost never act out of one tear motivation. I just want to point out even if we are often acting because it feels good or because they are trying to satisfy our will to power, they might also be trying to promote our social status. So you might think when someone goes after somebody, tries to shame them, they are also trying to show i am someone to be reckoned with. [inaudible] this is a friend i want to have and so on. Taking this sort of mens rea element, how should we distinguish grandstanding from the attempt to lead by example when you feel youve can act as a moral guide for others and by demonstrating the correct course of action in your personal life others will follow along . Thats good. Motivations for our behaviors are complex and varied. But heres a simple way to think about the different ways that we might be motivated to engage in Public Discourse. One broad category of motivation might be altruistic. We engage in Public Discourse and to say what they say because we truly care about other people. They are trying to help and Say Something that will promote understanding and promote seeking the truth and will provide good evidence. Youre saying things because you have a good reason to think this is going to be helpful. Thats one kind of motivation you could have and i think those are perfectly innocent and laudable motivations. Another kind of motivation that you might have could be called for motivations for things to do with beauty. Maybe you are not trying to help but trying to promote the right moral principles and articulate the moral truth. You are trying your best to give reasoning or evidence to discover what they ought to do or we ought to get together, and i think those are often virtuous motivations for discourse, too. The third category in motivations is the one that causes a lot of trouble and those are ego motivations come up with for this to engage in discourse. For selfinterested reasons and the reasons we primarily are interested in the buck having to do with social status. When you engage in Public Discourse for these reasons, selfserving reasons, that doesnt just hold constant what you say. Its going to motivate and caused you to say things they wouldnt otherwise say and do things you wouldnt otherwise do if you were not selfishly motivated and so for lots of reasons that we discussed in the book, these motivations in the Public Discourse caused all kinds of problems. They lead to cynicism about the Public Discourse. It causes outrage exhaustion and its often disrespectful. It treats people as a means, come scripting them into the morality to show people how good your using discourse and free rides on other peoples wellintentioned uses of Public Discourse. And also we think that using Public Discourse in these selfish ways is just pathetic. That isnt what morality is for. Its not try to gain social status or to try to impress people. The point of morality isnt to dominate people and shame them and make them cower before you. That is a cheap pathetic way to use morality. So for all those reasons, we think the motivated Public Discourse is going to lead to a lot of the problems we see. Our case is made easier if you look at the Public Discourse no one thinks it is going well. We all think it could be going better and we counsel people to think about how they are contributing. Are they engaging in discourse for altruistic reasons, and one way to simply test that is to ask, just ask ourselves am i doing this because i want to look good or because i actuallyy think it is going to do good and we think that is the kind of question we should be asking before we engage in discourse. If we try to imagine the examples of grandstanding, many of the ones we will come up with if not most of them will be in the political sphere, but it seems people grandstand quite a lot on political issues so im curious about the relationship between politics and grandstanding if on the one hand is it easier to grandstand about political issues and in the current environment you get more engagement if you grandstand on political issues, or is there perhaps the causation on the other direction, the kind of issues that we tend to grandstand on are the ones that then become politicized, like the moral outrage leads us to wanting to politicize the outcome of those issues. Thats a great question in a lot of different ways i could take that. One of the things people expect us to do in this book that we dont do is to really go after politicians because when you think of grandstanding, but first things you think of are probably politicians engaging in [inaudible] but they see the matter of little differently. We actually think that the fault for political grandstanding lies mostly on the people who demand it. So heres the great thing about political actors in a democracy. They tend to basically give us the font. What we want. So why do politicians grandstand . Because they are rewarded for it. So Politicians Face incentives that the rest of us our friends will sort of like your posts maybe if we say things that are pleasing to them, but our livelihood generally does not depend on the people around us, our supporters if you want to think of it that way. It doesnt depend on whether they think that we are good upstanding people. This causes a lot of problems in politics and there is good reason for us to stop demanding that politicians engage in these sort of attention grabbing uses of talk. One problem is that because we encourage our politicians to take these moralized stances we see fewer cases of important compromise. Why is that . If someone takes a moral stance on an issue, people tend to really punish them. If they then changed he their md or introducing new ones into the position because they take that person to have been committed to that stands by the same token we expect politicians to be loyal. We dont like it when they get into the other side because that makes it look like again they are going back on that commitment and politicians have every incentive not to compromise. When we turned that into a morality pageant that is basically what we get, a display of everyones good intentions instead of policies that work. They call this the expressive policy problem. Take rent control for instance. Basically, every economist agrees that it doesnt work. It causes housing shortages. It doesnt make it more affordable and get politicians, many of whom must know this, continued to call for introducing the measures because on the face of it, it looks like these policies will promote some morally worthy goal that is making it easier for people to have a home. For a lost my train of thought for a second. They do this because it is a lot easier to give people what they want by proposing these policies than it is to sit down and explain to them no, you need to understand supply and demand and how markets work. They have their slogan about how everyone deserves housing as a matter of basic fairness and so because the issue is so moralized, we get policies that sound good and dont work. Its easy for most people to see grandstanding on the other side as it were. Its easy to see that grandstanding politicians can egotistically motivated politicians, but every politician does it, and i think we just have to be honest of people who come even our beloved come if there are beloved politicians, on our own side are doing this and they do it as justin pointed out because we want it. We want them to affirm our values. Study after study shows people vote because they think someone shares their values or cares about them, and those are all well and fine, but the problem is when politicians come as justin pointed out, support and proposed policies merely because they express those values not because they are actually going to speak t [inaudible] in the prevalence of grandstanding today, is there a technological aspect to this continued widespread nature . Do we have more avenues to broadcast our virtues or to curate how we present ourselves to the world . Or has this whole thing kind of going on for a long time and maybe it was just less visible . We are given to book the ingredients out of basic human ingredients for the grandstanding are as old as society is and the desire to impress people and the desire for status. In many aspects of life we are able to overcome those. You might be at a dinner party and they want people to know how much you make or where you went to college but few are able to o overcome those and keep your mouth shut. So, those motivations have been with us a long time. If theres anything sort of intrinsically unique about the present moment, what is different is that at no time have people been able to just get on their phone and immediately talk to hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and for the love of human beings, that temptation to get the positive feedback to impress people to be liked and say things maybe not because they think they are true but you think that it will raise your status and political movement, those temptations are going to be hard to overcome so we dont think theres anything new about human psychology. What is new is that humans on a scale never seen before are able to talk to people. Even just 100 years ago they would have to sit on a Street Corner and convince people to listen to you or be a teacher or politician to have an audience. Each of us now with the touch of a finger has an audience greater than any of our ancestors could have ever imagined the common person to have come as it is easier for each of us to grandstand. Its also easier just to find it. You can log on and scroll through twitter and probably see a bunch of grandstanding if you spend 20 minutes on twitter you are probably going to see it. It allowed it to be easier for us to act on these desires for status and to impress others and its also made it much easier to find. Just to interject with one optimistic note you might think of this as file, you know, theyve introduced technology there is no way we can live together with easy platforms for grandstanding so inevitably we will always be at each others throats. Let me give you a reason not to think that. Its plausible that this is just a case where the norms havent caught up with the social environment yet. So, here is an example. If you look at medieval etiquette guides for the middle ages people see authors writing for adults but can not only read but they can afford books and theres a reason for them to buy books about etiquette. The advice is stuff like do not small on a bone and put it back on a serving dish, dont blow your nose into the tablecloth. Stuff that if anyone ever told me this i dont remember, its so obvious to these people is like we had a whole book to explain stuff like this. So what happened, the norms caught up. Here is a case where maybe if people did not have opportunities to blow their nose that often where they were mostly eating outside or not and refined settings and all of a sudden they had these opportunities to gratify and satisfy these strong urges, so they did. But people dont do that anymore and the reason they dont is because the norms caught up. What brandon and i hope that eventually they will catch up for grandstanding also. People will come to see that when someone gets on facebook or twitter and leaves a long caption on instagram about whatever social justice or whatever issue they want to impress people about, this will kind of p be seen not as the sot of thing people do in polite company. I am interested in the Practical Applications you imagine for this book, for the ideas that are set out particularly because i can see the tension in how they are applied. The first way is conducted to the mens rea discussion that there is a selfassessment. Having this taxonomy makes it easier for you to recognize when you are doing it, but the other way is like other diagnosis so those of us that had the experience with a roommate i was a psych major to know that roommate would come home from class and immediately diagnose you and everyone he knew with all manners of Mental Illness is based oillnessesbased on whateve had been that they and i can see something similar happening. Anytime anyone does a talk they would say thats an example of piling on or that is an example of trumping up. So what d you see as the reader reads this what you expect them to do with it and ideally what would you like them to do with . The entire year last chapter of the book is what to do with grandstanding and this is particularly couple of philosophers. Im not in the business of telling people how to live their lives. It is a tricky phenomenon because as you rightly know it isnt something you can just read off of someones tech stuff you can just look at it often and know whether someone is grandstanding or be certain enough to justify a public accusation. Its kind of like lighting or demagoguery or humble bragging. This isnt clear whether someone is doing it or not so what did he do to solve this problem, one thing we offer is that its not a good idea to call people out for granted even if you think someone is doing it, calling someone out for doing this is probably not a good idea. Theres several reasons we gave, one of them thats just simply you probably dont have enough informatiodo not have enoughinfc accusation and then this goes into a moral reason because you dont know enough about this persons intentions and goals it is fair to them to make a public accusation and then there is a practical reason not to call someone a grandstander or accuse them because that would be counterproductive. Im going to accuse you and then youll say you were just grandstanding me and we will get in an argument about whats in my heart and what is in your heart. The first time that conversation the next time that kind of conversation is productive will be the first time. Its just not a good way to have a conversation. We dont think calling people off is a good idea. So, what do we do . What they want to do is change the norm, so go from the norm where it is accepted and even rewarded to the norm where people dont get it, they know better to treat Public Discourse in this way and they are not impressed by other peoples grandstanding so how do we do that . Here we draw on some work from the university of pennsylvania and the basic idea is set a good example in how we each engage in Public Discourse and that means, you know, admitting when youre wrong, paying attention to the data and the evidence, understanding that being outraged or expressing anger is an argument and being hard on yourself than other people it is easier to treat ourselves with grace and think they are great and can be critical of others that i think the Public Discourse calls for the division of labor. We should be harder on ourselves and more critical than others. Theres a lot of tips and tricks we talk about how to avoid grandstanding. So then you might think okay suppose i stop grandstanding is just a drop in the bucket. How to get othe do we get othero stop if we do not call them out, and our advice here is to be withholding instead of calling someone out for grandstanding if you suspect someone is grandstanding, dont give them what they seek. Imagine writing a very detailed, passionate, you know, criticism of something at Overland College for serving generals chicken or whatever the case is and you are trying to show people you care about this issue and youve are imported and then no one responds, no one likes it or says oh my gosh you are so great, thank you. If no one does that at least for most of us it is going to be embarrassing so we think the only way to change the norms, to distance into the selfcentered moral talk is if you think you see it, avoid it. Just like mauling at a bone at the dinner table would be embarrassing, try to make the selfcentered Public Discourse a thing of the past by making it something embarrassing to engage in. People are often very dissatisfied with parts of the book that i think that maybe this is the people that are friendly to the project are least satisfied with because they want to get those grandstanders. They dont like being told they shouldnt go after them so here is what i tell people when they say this. Remember why we are here. Remember what th the discourse r and why grandstanding is bad. The point of the discourse is to figure out what is true and then to get people to do what they ought to do. If you go around pointing out what people are grandstanding and try to embarrass them in a way you are getting exactly what he or she wants. You are letting them make the Public Discourse about themselves. So even if it did work and some people came to see them as a joke or whatever, you would still be getting exactly what they are doing and that is making talk about the wrong thing. Thank you for that answer. We are starting to run a little low on times its time to move into the audience qanda. Our first question has been asked by a couple of people and a couple of anonymous commentators asked how anonymity expects these expressions can see perhaps the costs and payoffs would be less if you were speaking anonymously. Thanks everyone for joining us today. So, anonymity does change the story a little bit but we think not by much. If you think about yourself typing on the internet, whether you have a name attached to it or not its not like a random stranger knows who you are even if you are using a name, even if you are using your real name. So the fact that you might not attach your identity it isnt going to make a difference. Here is what they are often thinking that it is often not very sophisticated. They are thinking is a im going to say this thing, and i want people to see this and the people that wrote this as morally impressive. Its true they cannot parade around and take credit for the name but they are still thinking to themselves i want to be seen as a certain kind of person even if all of my audience thinking the person that wrote the thing is reallthat thingis really awee when youve are the grandstand grandstander, all you might care about is this other people think the person that wrote it which happens to be you and you know it is is impressive and that might be satisfying as much as anything else. A lot of the impression management is reflective so its turned back on ourselves. They call it solve impression management. Its peeking through the satisfaction in our own moral greatness. But for a lot of people they can still get the satisfaction and the desire to just have people think that. Is there a correlation between the scope of issues in the debate and the grandstanding if it would motivate more grandstanding. I thought that it is about two different things. On the one hand theres the scope of the issue and a bit about rent seeking and how much is at stake. Let me try this. One way you can grandstand in other words it is a status to be had everyone else probably overlooked then you must be morally special sensitive or wise in heretofore unrecognized issues and maybe this is what he was getting at on rent seeking is thinking of people as rational actors the more if we think that this isnt ideal behavior for a good outcome or the recently invented claims and pleasing one another for violating them, then we want to also give people a little bit less credit for behaving this way. Our next question asking how we can best respond to exhibitions of grandstanding and wondering whether a suppression of response would be sufficient as one might listen to the grandstander in silence and whether you approve of what they said or not. This is a nice practical question is what a psychologist named joshua grubbs, so far we have done several studies with several thousand participants and one of the things we want to get to is what kind of interventions are effective and also respectful are dealing with the grandstanding. One thing i suspect is helpful in these kind of situations is to gently move to the topic of conversation away from the speaker whether it is me challenging the grandstand or to take the conversation away from it being personal and not make it personal. Its not whether you care about the poor or i care about the poor. Its about the issue. So what are the relevant issues. One thing you could do is ask could yothis taskcould you refrn for me and tell me about the principle that you have, what is the relevant principle or lets think about the kind of negative consequences that might come from this proposal or do you have any good to you that you could share. Im not promising before going to work but i do have a suspicion in the personal selfpromotion and making it out the issue at hand is i suspect that might be a helpful way to do it. What kind of interventions might be helpful. I think we have time for one more question this time coming from the sit side of a potential grandstander if someone is using language to signal to encourage the norm changes is is distinct from what motivates grandstanding and what would you recommend for someone considering in support of the cost. We dont get that many questions people are more interested in how they can get the standards they want to go after him i found later no one cared about me. I had gotten no social credit, no one was impressed. Ask yourself what youd be disappointed and the answer is yes that is good evidence that maybe you cared about it too much in this instance and maybe not enough about what it would do for other people. It could be a case where its so important that someone Say Something. Even if you are grandstanding its still the right thing to do. But even in that case, it would be optimal if you are not motivated to seek status for yourself and if you were primarily just going for helping others, but its good to ask. One thing we didnt point out that we discuss in the book is it might be okay in some cases to grandstand. We are perfectly comfortable with that. The font isnt that its everywhere to be done. There may be cases we are givend that there is a strong presumption against lying or bragging or a strong presumption against grandstanding so here is a thought. If you can do them without trying to see forward yourself the status, you are going to be more effective than to seek status for your self. That is an excellent note to end on a. Thank you very much for joining us and all of the viewers are watching. The book is grandstanding the use and abuse of moral power and its available in print today so you can find it anywhere else like to find books and there will be additional material posted on the events page so thank you again to all of the guests and audience and have a wonderful afternoon. American Enterprise Institute scholar